Filetable is a new feature in SQL Server 2012 which allows application to access files that’s stored in disk via SQL Server, that’s the main function. In other words you can store files and directories to windows NTFS folders and these files can be accessed non transactional from application like regular file system. FileTables act as a normal table however it requires FILESTREAM to be enabled. You can query & update this table to get information about the directories and files stored in the location and also it’s hierarchy.

AWE (Addressing Windows Extension) is one of the know server configuration to everyone. This parameter allows SQL Server to access large amount of memory in 32 bit machines. However MS decided to depreciate this configuration in SQL Server 2012 (Denali) . I hope this is the first step towards depreciating all 32 bit SQL server editions. So if you are using this setting in your current environment then you need to be careful while upgrading it to SQL Server 2012.

I’ve wrote this script to get data file allocated and used space. In addition to this I’ve also added auto growth setting details for the data file. Written two scripts for fetching the details, first one will get you the details for one database and second one will give you the details for all the database data files.

Today I’m going to discuss another new feature in SQL Server 2012. Pagination in result set is a new feature in SQL Server 2012. ORDER BY clause in SQL Server 2012 is enhanced with additional parameters that is OFFSET and FETCH. Using this parameter allows you to fetch data from a particular page from result set, you can also specify how many rows to retrieve. However an ORDER BY clause is compulsory to utilize this feature.

Happy New Year My dear Friends

It’s  been a long this feature has been released however I just got an opportunity to check it out. This feature is released in SQL Server 2008 version. Sparse columns are normal columns which will store NULL values in a optimized storage which means no storage space is taken when you store NULL values to that column. Happy !! there is some overhead for storing non NULL values to this columns, it will take some more space for non NULL values.